A kind of garden and an emotional world opens up in the lullaby toolbox. It is a landscape cultivated by the artist, where ideas and concerns are concentrated in the form of artifacts, which the artist perceives in a world that is changing more and more intensively due to human activity. On the one hand, Hirtentreu refers to the ecological crisis and the resulting destruction, on the other hand, it is a dreamlike and cognitive vision rather than a targeted criticism. The artefacts presented in the installation environment are rather meditative objects, each of which carries a separate story, and several of them have lived a long life during the artist’s previous creative journey. At the same time, the created objects are tools and an invitation to feel the world more empathetically towards other beings. Thus, the space shaped into a lullaby toolbox can be seen as a temporary crystallization of Hirtentreu’s practice, from which the artist invites the viewer to discover and create modern lullabies.
In Hirtentreu’s toolbox, you can find tools to lull the world of the dead, to send one on their way with tenderness, and through the romantic-mechanical feeling, to find tenderness also towards creatures that are no longer in our world. What is important here is both remembering and commemorating, both ghosts and monsters and finding beauty in them. By giving physical shapes to the spirits and recreating their materiality, the artist gives the viewer the opportunity to perceive them as corporeal beings similar to us, who do not exist so much in a closed world, but precisely in a garden set up for commemoration, where guests are welcome.
Eclecticism and Gothic play an important role in Hirtentreu’s art, the latter in its most romantic manifestation. The massiveness of the material combined with fine ornamentation opens up a modern interpretation of the Gothic – references to artificial and organic intertwine as a hybrid wall as a semi-wild landscape, which can be discovered both as a secret place and as a way of perceiving the world.
Madlen Hirtentreu
Lullaby Toolbox
Dates: 10.09.2023-01.10.2023
Open from Wednesday till Sunday 12-6pm.
Location: Haapsalu Linnagalerii (Posti 3, Haapsalu)
